Shaoshi Huang

I plan on learning how to better cope with depression/anxiety. I've recently started seeing a therapist so I suppose this is pretty good timing. I imagine knowing how to cope with those things in healthy ways can make it a lot easier to live with them. I'm sure going digital will also impact my mental health along with other people's so I will definitely be using what I learn.

Everyone, at every age, uses social media to show their audience something they think they'd like. A lot of people post what they think will get the most likes. This can lead to a false online persona that doesn't quite line up with who the real person is. The teenager applying to the Ivy League posted what he felt he needed to keep up with his peers and to be a valid member of the group. A sense of belonging is something that Boyd points out is very important for young people. My Instagram has evolved with how I view others and what I think about what they think about me. I used to post things with the goal of getting likes so I would try to post the best pictures. Now, I don't really care who likes or sees it because I'm more confident and sure of myself as a person. I know that I have people around me that care about me no matter what. I've never posted anything that shouldn't be on the Internet because I was taught from the start that anything I post will be on there forever even if I delete it I never worried about what colleges/employers would see. 

I agree with Dewey in that learning should be more collaborative and experience based. I know in school, the class overall would learn better when the teacher put us all in a roleplay scenario because it would make the lesson more personal. Of course, there were some students who would prefer to learn from the book, but for the most part, students learned better the other way. Building a sense of community in the classroom by making students collaborate also makes for better life skills like communication and problem solving which are things that can't be learned from reading a book. You could know a lot about something, but if you're not able to communicate that or if you're difficult to get along with, your knowledge won't be as important to them. However, if you don't know everything at a job but are able to ask questions and get along with most people, the people around you will be more willing to work with you in the future because they know how you think and are able to have fun along the way. 

This weekend I was in a funk. Depression sucks. About all I could do was sleep or lay in bed and stare at the ceiling or wall. I couldn't focus on anything long enough to think about it. I've been spending the last few hours trying to do the work I would've done. Every once in a while I get in these mental fogs and I've been working on how to deal with them and maybe even prevent them from happening. 

Just like a lot of people, I struggle with time management and procrastination problems. I mean obviously because I've had about a week to do this and I'm just doing it now. I tend to overestimate how driven my future self will be and ignore the reality that I'll probably be even less motivated to do said task because I'm further from when I first thought about doing it. 

I also tend to underestimate how long a task will take me so I'll mentally schedule out everything to do for the day, but only get a few things done because I either kept taking breaks making the task take longer or the task actually took longer than expected. 

The biggest problem is that my chronic procrastination works which is why I keep doing it. If it didn't, I probably would've stopped the first few times. However, I've found that I do my best work from 2am-4am the night before an assignment's due. I hate myself every second for it and think of all the times I could've done it earlier, but when I find out I did well, I use that to justify future occurances. 

Technology is undoubtidly changing the world in ways people couldn't have imagined even just 10 years ago. 

We tend to portray ourselves better online than we do in real life which is what the TedTalk spoke about. I think this is because we all either consciously or subconsciously know that anyone can stumble upon what we put out onto the internet and want to make a good first impression. I think we've become so obssessed with how we appear to others online that it's spilled into our real lives as well. People will track how far they've run, calories, heart rate, sleep, etc. I see more and more people tracking their stats either on a phone, watch, or some other device. They want to know as much as they can about ourselves so we can build a better self image. 

I don't personally wear a FitBit or anything like that because well, A. I can't afford one and B. I don't feel the need to know every little detail about myself. Knowing whether I walked 1,000 or 10,000 steps doesn't cocern me because I have the privilege of being in good physical health and don't think about things like that. I think if I did start using a device like a FitBit, I would get overly obessesive to the point of becoming more mentally unhealthy than physcially unhealthy. 

I'm not too concerned about the privacy factor because while I do think privacy is important, I don't have anything to hide and I'm just one of billions of people on this planet so the chances of me being singled out for a piece of data is slim, but not 0.  There's definitely a line to be drawn when it comes to privacy, but I'm not quite sure where it is.